Joan. Marush. A Biography‪.‬

This is the story of Joan, a teenage American girl whose life was almost derailed by ballet obsession

and eating disorders. By moving to Paris in 1959 and hitchhiking all over Europe throughout most

of the 1960s, Joan succeeded in “finding herself ” and discovering abilities and competencies she

hadn’t previously been aware of. She chronicled her odyssey of self-realization in hundreds of letters

home describing her adventurous travels and the richness of her educational, artistic, and cultural

experiences in Paris. The letters ended with her return to “real life” in the United States in the 1970s,

but the narrative of her struggle to satisfy her unquenchable desire to dance continues in a series

of oral history interviews, which describe her transition from the lovely but subdued Joan to the

more dramatic Marush. And then, in 1980 Marush met and formed a lasting companionship—a

“duprass,” to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s term—with the author of this biography, a reliable eyewitness

to Marush’s subsequent forty-five happily-ever-after years as a 100%, to-the-core New Yorker who

could have been happy nowhere else.